Janice stood up. “Would you like to see my Christmas tree? I just finished decorating it, and I thought, ‘There’s no one around to see it except Al’—that’s my husband, and he couldn’t care less about such things. And then I looked out the window and there you were, and I thought, ‘I bet that little girl would like to see this tree.’”
“Yes’m,” Lou Belle said, and she followed Janice Mosely into the house, and she studied the evergreen that Janice had harried her husband into buying and which she had then decorated carefully, all the while listening to Christmas music and ignoring her husband’s grumblings and general humbuggery.
Lou Belle touched the glass ornaments. Lou Belle leaned close and blinked at the hand-sewn angels. She even rubbed the styrofoam snowman against her cheek—it made a skritch, skritch sound—but finally she stepped back and said, “It won’t catch nuthin.”
Lou Belle thought about it that night when she couldn’t sleep. Silly old lady. What could you catch inside a house, anyway? Even with the best of traps?
Lou Belle couldn’t sleep because tomorrow was Omen Day, the third day before Christmas. Last night they had baited the traps, and this morning they would get out of bed while it was still dark out; they would wake their father and he would make them eat breakfast first, while they craned their necks and peered out the back window, trying to squint through the darkness. Father would move slow, especially slow out of that meanness that adults have, and he would fix eggs and toast and talk about everything, as though it weren’t Omen Day at all but any normal day and finally, finally, when they had all finished and were watching and fidgeting as their father mopped up the last of his eggs with a bread crust, he would say, “All right, let’s see what we’ve got.”
And it would still be dark, and he would grab up the big lantern flashlight and they would run down to the tree.
Who could possibly sleep the night before Omen Day?
And when it finally did come, when Lou Belle could stand it no longer and ran into her brother Hark’s room and woke him and then the two of them fetched Danny and Calder and the long, long breakfast was endured, they pushed the screen door open and ran out into the darkness of the yard. Her heart thrummed like a telephone wire in a hurricane. The grass was wet under her feet.
She thought she would faint when her father, moving the flashlight over the tree, said, “There’s a lizard. That’s a red dot. Calder, that’s you.” She wanted to cry out, “No! Not Calder! I’m the Chosen!” But before she could scream, her father spoke again, in a low, awed whisper. “Well, would you look at that.” And Lou Belle followed the flashlight’s beam with her eyes, and there, flapping awkwardly, caught, like a wound-down toy, was a black, furry lump, and her breathing flipped backwards and she said, in a hiccup of triumph, “Bat!” And she knew, before her father called out “Blue, that’s Lou Belle” that it was hers.
And she didn’t need her father to tell her that bat was best, that bat was the king of good luck. She clapped her hands and laughed.
“Light the tree, Lou Belle,” they urged her, and she smelled the kerosene smell that was, more than anything, the smell of Christmas, and her father gave her the burning straw and she thrust it forward, and the whole tree stood up with flame, whoosh, and in the brightness she could see the bat, her bat, and she squealed with joy. Then her father started it off, with his fine, deep voice. “Silent night, holy night,” he sang. They all joined in. “All is calm, all is bright.”
“Listen,” Janice said to her husband. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Carolers,” Janice said. “Isn’t that nice?”
Because Lou Belle was the Chosen, she stole the mud turtle shell from Hark and filled it with smooth stones. And on Christmas Eve, just before twilight, Lou Belle distributed the stones among her brothers, and they each made their wishes on them and solemnly threw them into the lake, and then they all climbed into the back of their father’s pickup truck and drove into town and on past the town and down to Clearwater and late, very late at night, with the salt air filling her lungs, Lou Belle fell asleep, her head resting on a dirty blanket smelling faintly of gasoline. When she woke it was dark, thick, muggy dark, and Hark was urging her out of the truck. She ran after them, instantly alert. A bouncing, silver ball on the grass was the orb of her father’s flashlight.
They were in a suburb. She heard glass break and then Danny was beside her. “Come on, come on,” he was whispering.
Oh. Her father had pushed open the sliding glass door to reveal, like a magician, a treasure of gifts, gaudily wrapped boxes, all strewn under a thick-bodied Christmas tree pin-pricked with yellow lights. Amid all the gift-wrapped boxes, a marvelous orange tricycle with yellow handlebars glowed.
“Oh,” Lou Belle said. She pointed a stubby finger at the bike, and her father moved swiftly across the room, lifted the bike and returned to her.
“Shhhhhhhhhhh,” her father said, raising a finger to his lips.
Hark and Danny and Calder were busy under the tree. Calder raised both hands, clutching a brand new air rifle, a smile scrawled across his face.
This is the best Christmas, the best, Lou Belle thought. Next year some of the magic would be gone. Other Christmases would bring disillusionment. She would learn, as her brothers already knew, that her father took great pains to discover a proper house, and that it was his vigilance and care in the choosing that was important, not the catch on Omen Day, not how fervently the wishes were placed on the turtle stones.
But for now it was all magic, and as they raced back across the lawn and piled into the truck, as the motor caught with a sound like thunder, as someone behind them shouted, Lou Belle sent a quick prayer to the baby Jesus, king of thieves.
Best Man
I had been married for five years when Harry Bream showed up on my doorstep. I hadn’t seen him in all that time. I think he was wearing the same suit, a wrinkled, gravy-colored polyester. The suit was large but not large enough, Harry being three hundred and fifty pounds of opinionated fat man. A tailor would have winced, imagining the sound of ripping seams.
Behind Harry, the grey December sky bellied out with the weight of incipient snow, like the sprung ceiling of some condemned tenement. Harry could make any landscape—even this ordered, suburban one—seem seedy and faintly surreal.
“Does Joyce still hate me?” Harry asked, standing there in the cold.
“I think so,” I said.
“Is she here?”
I told him that my wife was still at work, would be home in about an hour. I’d left work at noon, thanks to my friend Doug. We had been horsing around at the water cooler, and he had sucker punched me in the stomach. It wasn’t anything serious, but it had dampened my enthusiasm for the office, and I had driven home, hunched over the wheel like a bilious Quasimodo.
Now here was Harry at my door. “I’ve come to say I’m sorry, Dennis. I’ve come to apologize,” Harry said, sliding into the foyer and moving swiftly down the hall to the kitchen, where he opened the refrigerator door. “These Miller Lites all you got?” he shouted. He had pulled the four beers out and was holding them by an empty plastic loop.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” I said.
Harry came back into the living room, the beer cans dangling from his fist like a string offish. He sank into the sofa.
“It’s okay,” he said, the beers settling in his lap. “I should watch my weight anyway.”
He popped a beer, it fizzed up, and he ducked his head to suck the foaming brew.
“You think I got a chance of making up with Joyce?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He seemed suddenly fragile, childlike. Beneath the fuzzy, brillopad beard, chins were trembling.
“I don’t know,” I said, “You killed her brother, you know. And on her wedding day, too.”
I had been standing up, but now I sat in the big armchair, facing Harry, and I leaned forward. “I won’t lie and say they were close, but a woman is a n
ervous wreck on her wedding day, and when the best man shoots the bride’s brother, who is also an usher, hard feelings are bound to arise. You just naturally want things to go smoothly on your wedding day. I don’t mind telling you that I am not one hundred per cent resentment-free myself. I have mixed feelings about your reappearance.”
“It was an accident,” Harry grumbled, “and it was five years ago. And it’s not like I ruined the wedding. I didn’t shoot Justin until after the ceremony.”
“You ruined the reception, that’s for sure. And maybe it was five years ago, but time doesn’t heal everything,” I said. “Some things just set, like cement. Anyway, what brings you back now?”
“I’m having a mid-life crisis,” Harry said. “I figured I needed to patch things up.”
He lay back on my sofa, slipped his shoes off, and swung his feet up. He crushed the first beer can, set it on the end table, and found a second one.
Staring at the ceiling, he told me what he had been doing since I last saw him. He said that after the unpleasantness of the coroner’s hearing, he couldn’t stay in town. He drifted all over the U.S. Taught at this girls’ college for awhile. Bartended some. Wrote an advice column for a Midwestern newspaper. Bummed around the Northwest. Got a job as a park ranger in King’s Canyon.
Harry looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “One day I said to myself, ‘It’s time, Harry,’ and here I am.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s got to be time sometime,” he said.
Watching Harry lying there on the sofa, drinking my beers, I felt the smarmy embrace of nostalgia. Old Harry. We had been best friends in college. Even then, he was a moody kind of a guy, something of a slob, and an incredible moocher. We never roomed together, but when he visited my apartment, he would drink all my beers and eat everything in my fridge. He even brushed his teeth with my toothbrush which was pretty gross behavior, and still, I liked him. I liked his intensity. He was a philosophy major, and he took life seriously. He was a man of strong, loud opinions.
When we first met—in a bar called The Burnt Orange—he told me that he was studying philosophy to discover whether or not he should go on living. He was serious about this. “I hate Hamlet. That dirty waffler. Someone should have wrung his neck.”
Harry believed that the study of philosophy would either kill him or cure him, either plunge him into suicidal despair or offer some solid reasons for going on.
Well, Harry hadn’t killed himself (thanks, he said, to Spinoza), but he had killed Joyce’s brother, Justin. In 1987, Harry had been sitting in my father-in-law’s study with Justin Rhodes. Justin and Harry were drinking champagne and congratulating themselves on being single. The mansion grounds had just been the setting for my wedding to Joyce. Harry had performed best man honors and Justin had ushered.
They were hiding out in the study and reflecting—as men will at weddings and funerals—on the fine line separating the quick from the dead.
And then, life never tiring of irony, Harry had admired the deer rifle on a rack behind Justin’s head, and Justin had said, “It’s a beauty all right; here, have a look at it,” and Justin had reached back and lifted it off its rack and handed it to Harry; and Harry had immediately taken the rifle and shot Justin through the heart and run, screaming, out into the cool April twilight, sending a great crowd of overdressed guests into panic and causing my new bride to faint in my arms.
It had been an accident—the clichéd tragedy of the gun that was not supposed to be loaded—and the inquest came to the same conclusion. But accident or no accident, Joyce wasn’t eager to see Harry, and I felt a certain diffidence myself. Then Harry left for parts unknown.
Now he was back and lying on my sofa, primed for reconciliation. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that Joyce still hates me. I mean, she was never crazy about me, okay. I don’t think she likes fat people as a group because she fears becoming fat herself and sees us as the enemy. But I think I can convince her, logically, that her anger is irrational.”
“Harry,” I said, “Don’t get your hopes up. You know Joyce can be stubborn.”
Harry crushed the second beer and opened a third one. “Well, it’s been nagging at me. I can’t get any rest until I’ve tried. Five years I’ve been drifting around the country, never able to settle, and I had this insight: I won’t ever be at peace until Joyce forgives me.”
“Well—” I began. Just then I heard the door open, and apparently Harry heard it too, because he swung his feet off the sofa and sat upright.
Joyce came into the room. She is a small, thin woman with no fashion sense, and she was wearing extremely large round glasses and a grey suit that emitted an air of profound censure. She was lugging a briefcase large enough for shoplifting VCRs. With her frizzled, yellow hair, her magnified eyes, and her general awkwardness, she resembled a child playing daddy-comes-home-from-the-office. A draft of cold air blew in with her, and I jumped up and hugged her.
“Look who’s here,” I said.
Joyce has never liked any of my friends. Not, in any event, those friends that I had before I met her. She may be jealous of them—no doubt that explains the animosity that exists between many a new wife and her husband’s longtime friends. But I think, to do Joyce justice, that she is incapable of liking my friends because, by and large, they are unlikable.
To list just a few of my old friends and their rough edges:
Bob Hapsburg. Cannot be interrupted. Talks only about illnesses he has had or expects to have. Is eloquent but repetitive about his digestive system.
Darrel Lodge. A very thin man generally sporting some variety of food in a large, yarn-like mustache. Always talks in the plural, being married to a woman who fascinates him. Darrel was my roommate my sophomore year in college. Joyce has never met his wife, but she has heard that wife’s every opinion and finds her insufferably long-winded. Joyce tells me she hates the ghostly Mrs. Lodge more than the wan presence of her Boswell-like husband.
John Lepholdt. A long-haired, wired individual who believes that his life is in jeopardy because of what he knows about the JFK and Hoffa assassinations. On more than one occasion he has sought refuge at my house at two or three in the morning. I assure Joyce that he is harmless, but even I have to admit that he seems a little less coherent, a little more fragmented, with each passing year. His heart is in the right place, though, and he has offered to give me a tidy sum when he decodes the Mafia-run Maryland lottery (the secret of which is lodged in the 1979 Dayton, Ohio phone book).
But enough. I merely wished to demonstrate that I have acquired the sort of friends that any wife might dislike, and that Joyce is not unreasonably intolerant. “Did you seek these people out?” she always asks me, and on days when my old friends are trying my patience, I wonder if I am unique in the number of friends I have that would be of interest to a clinical psychologist. Suffice it to say, that on the day of my wedding, Harry Bream was the most solid of the lot, and that’s how he landed the position of best man.
I’ve digressed, however—and at a critical juncture.
Joyce turned and glared at me. “Dennis,” she said. “How could you?”
“What?” I said.
“You know what,” she said. “What is he doing here?”
Harry is not much in the nuance department, but I could see that he was uncomfortable. Somewhere along the line he had learned that when a friend’s spouse refers to you in the third person she is manifesting some coolness.
Harry stood up. “Joyce, I’ve come to make my apologies!”
“Get out!” Joyce screamed.
“Let bygones be bygones,” he said.
“How dare you come here!” Joyce shouted. “How dare—”
That’s when Harry produced the gun. It was a small, black revolver, and he pulled it out of his pocket.
“Look,” he said. Joyce stepped backward, dropping her briefcase, and Harry was suddenly at her side. He had slapped the gun into her palm and returned to
the sofa before I could move from the armchair.
“Shoot me,” he said.
Joyce was staring in horror at the gun in her hand. My Joyce hates all forms of violence, and even refuses to watch old episodes of “I Love Lucy” for what she sees as a sort of slapstick vandalism that should not be condoned or endured.
“Shoot me,” Harry said. “I deserve it. You know I do.”
I watched my wife’s eyes narrow behind those shiny, round glasses. I believe if my friend Jack Besler hadn’t visited me from Kansas City the week before, everything would still have been okay. But Jack had come, accompanied by his girlfriend Sally, and they had run naked through our house, snapping each other with towels, giggling wildly, creating a mountain of dirty dishes and empty pizza cartons.
Sally had accused Joyce of being “an uptight juiceless office Jane” which, Sally said, was an observation, not an attack, but Joyce had been offended, I could see that.
I really think that if Harry’s timing had been different, if he hadn’t arrived right on the heels of Jack and Sally, things might have been different.
“What’s the deal?” Joyce said, an unusual, metallic glitter in her half-closed eyes.
“Shoot me,” Harry said. “I don’t expect you to just say everything’s okay. I understand that something real is required. An eye for an eye, Joyce. So shoot me.”
“Is this thing loaded?” Joyce said, eyeing the gun with a reflective air.
Harry smiled. “Oh yes. There’s only one real bullet though. That’s the beauty of it. The rest are blanks or duds. Every time you pull that trigger, Joyce, there is the very real chance that you’ll kill me. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Even I don’t know where the real bullet is. It might be at the top. First pull of the trigger and ‘Bang!’ I’m dead. Or it might be the last bullet. Each time you pull that trigger, you can think about it. Just how much do you hate me, Joyce? Just how much?”
Joyce answered by pulling the trigger. Click!—a small, hard noise that filled up the room. She smiled. Harry sat with a beer on his lap. Beads of sweat steamed on his forehead. He looked scared now. She pulled the trigger again. Click.
The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories Page 16
